King, Mary Anne

ORAL HISTORY OF MARY ANNE KING
Interviewed and filmed by Keith McDaniel
June 16, 2011
Mr. McDaniel: This is Keith McDaniel and today is June the 16th, 2011 and I am here in Oak Ridge with Mrs. Mary Anne King. Thank you, Mrs. King, for taking the time to talk to us. Tell me about where you were born and raised and something about your family.
Mrs. King: I was born in Statesville, North Carolina and my mother and father had six children and I was along the road. Mother – they lost one and then had another. I went to Statesville High School and Mitchell Community College there for two years. I had three sisters and two brothers but one baby brother is deceased now. That’s all you needed to know there. Then we were fortunate in having a college in our hometown. As I said, I attended that. Then went on to Greensboro, North Carolina to attend Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina and got my graduate degree there. It was while I was at Greensboro that I was recruited by someone from Tennessee Eastman. The war had started in 1941 and they were recruiting people to come out here to work. Mr. McDaniel: Let’s go back. Let me ask you a question before we get to that. What did your parents do?
Mrs. King: My father was an attorney at law and my mother was a homemaker. She had attended a college earlier over in Greensboro. It was called State Normal and she taught school.
Mr. McDaniel: If it was a ‘Normal,’ it was probably a teacher’s college, wasn’t it?
Mrs. King: It was. She got her teacher’s degree there. And my grandmother and grandfather were there, her parents. My father’s parents lived up the road and he was – I was a Bristol, B-R-I-S-T-O-L. Father died fairly young and mother was left widowed with five children living. So is there something else that you –
Mr. McDaniel: I guess you grew up during the depression at that time?
Mrs. King: Oh yes. 1929.
Mr. McDaniel: What was that like? Now your father – you said your father was an attorney.
Mrs. King: Yes, but father was very ill towards the last four years of his life, but he still went to his law office and other things.
Mr. McDaniel: But with five kids, even a professional like that, I’m sure it was tough, wasn’t it?
Mrs. King: It was, yes. You know what it’s like when someone says, “Are we going to have something tonight?” We didn’t suffer, but we learned to economize, every one of us, and to save. I think that was important. When one of the banks failed in my hometown – it was First National Bank – I even at that age had a bank account, a savings account. In later years, they were paying back and I’d go down and collect my ten cents per whatever it was that I had. But I knew what it was to save and what it was to know that people were going through hard times, including my father. And later Mother went back and learned some business – well learned how to do shorthand and type and was able to continue that after father died. So then I grew up just a normal family with friends around and relatives.
Mr. McDaniel: So you were in college. You went to Greensboro.
Mrs. King: Yes. To finish my –
Mr. McDaniel: To finish your degree.
Mrs. King: My education.
Mr. McDaniel: What year was that when you finished?
Mrs. King: I finished on D-Day, June 6th, 1944.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mrs. King: Yes. That morning, my mother had come over for the service, I mean the graduation ceremony. I said to my roommate. I said, “Something special, I feel it, is happening today.” Well it was D-Day and this came out – it was going on while we were graduating, I mean, having the ceremony. But the governor of North Carolina spoke. That was then. It was earlier that, while I was still at Greensboro, that the head of the Business College came and said that, to different ones of us, he said that, “They are recruiting and we’d like you to go up to talk with them,” and explained what it was. It was someone from Tennessee Eastman. And we came – is that – can I go on to the next step?
Mr. McDaniel: No, you’re good. Yeah, sure. Go ahead.
Mrs. King: My sister and another friend from Statesville came out for interviews in April of that year, and we came by Southern Railroad up to Knoxville and stayed in the Andrew Johnson Hotel and our first stop for dinner was the old Regas Cafe there where they serve the best steaks that one could ever want.
Mr. McDaniel: Absolutely.
Mrs. King: The next morning we were picked up by someone from Tennessee Eastman and were brought to Oak Ridge. That lady took us on a tour, using up time, and we drove all the way up Oak Ridge Turnpike and she said, “Now, up on this hill is where you’re going to live in dormitories,” and they were not built at that time. It’s where the Garden Apartments are now.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Now what year was that that you came?
Mrs. King: 1944.
Mr. McDaniel: So it was ’44.
Mrs. King: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: So the war was still going on?
Mrs. King: Oh yes. We came in April of ’44 out here for an interview and we were – after she showed us around town and said, “That’s” – well she said, “You’re going to be living here.” Well we did – I did live on the top row, and we had – that’s another part. We had to climb this long walk up to the – the busses didn’t go up to the top of that hill. And then we had to walk up when we got off. We either went by – we’d walk down in the mornings to catch a trailer or a bus to take us to Y-12 or whichever place we were working.
Mr. McDaniel: Let me ask you a question. Speaking of that hill, was there a nickname for that hill? Because I’ve heard a nickname for that hill.
Mrs. King: Well at the time there might have been. I don’t – I remember Adam’s Cafeteria was down there, but they also served breakfast at Y-12 at that time and we could get a breakfast if we went early enough.
Mr. McDaniel: Well I meant the dormitories up where the Garden Apartments are. I had a fellow I was interviewing once and he said, “You know,” he said, “They go to the women’s dormitories and say, ‘Next stop, Old Maid’s Hill,” is what he said. [laughter]
Mrs. King: No! I didn’t know that, because we were not really old maids.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, I know.
Mrs. King: We were just young children out of college.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mrs. King: So this is the kind of thing that they had up on that hill, above even the last hill, they had grills up there as they used to have one up behind the church at [Jackson Square] – up where the Chapel on the Hill is – they had grills up there that you could go have picnics for those who worked down in that area.
Mr. McDaniel: So you came in the spring in April ’44 for the visit.
Mrs. King: And then were interviewed by several people down at Y-12.
Mr. McDaniel: You and your sister?
Mrs. King: Now, Caroline – yes, she was interviewed. She has – because they took our pictures. I can remember our badge numbers, 16345. Yes. Then Caroline, because she was to come later, and we were told we would hear from them. And that was the interview. We stayed for a while. We had to go through security to – it was at the top of Y-12, I mean the security house was. We entered some kind of pass to get that far. It turns out that I worked in that building later. It was the security building where the badges were given out and my boss worked there.
Mr. McDaniel: But you all came in ’44 for the interview.
Mrs. King: Yes, April, and I came back after graduation, which was in June of ’44.
Mr. McDaniel: In June of ’44, right.
Mrs. King: Yes. I had to get everything packed up to return and they were aware that I would have two or three weeks off and would come back in June. So I did.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, well, good. Now, did your sister come too?
Mrs. King: Caroline was coming later, and she came in August.
Mr. McDaniel: But when you came in June, you lived up on the women’s dormitories where the Garden Apartments are and you went to work at Y-12.
Mrs. King: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: What did you do there? Who did you work for?
Mrs. King: I worked for security. Mr. Gibson was his name, and he was – they had several in there. They had those who made the badges in the room behind me, and they had this little inner room where the secretary group was and his desk. Then out front was where they gave the badges out, and that’s when sometimes Mr. Gibson wanted me or one of the other girls to give the badges to the officers who came in. So everyone who went down in the plant had to have – if you lost your badge you had to come in that building to get a new badge or something to go down, because they had to walk through guards, and I guess you’ve heard that also, that everybody had to show a badge at a window.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, sure, of course.
Mrs. King: Even we who left the building had to make sure if we went down into the cafeteria that we had to show our badges to the guards as we – even though we were familiar to their faces. So we had to do that there.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Absolutely. So I bet you met a lot of people in that job, didn’t you?
Mrs. King: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: You met just everybody that came to Y-12, didn’t you?
Mrs. King: Yes. We had to talk with security up at – at that time it was USED and then it became AEC, didn’t it?
Mr. McDaniel: Yes.
Mrs. King: Then now it’s – is it still AEC?
Mr. McDaniel: Now it’s DOE.
Mrs. King: DOE, excuse me. I didn’t keep up with the last one.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s okay. That’s all right.
Mrs. King: But I do, most memories. But the USED was the United States Energy –
Mr. McDaniel: Energy Department. Yes, ma’am.
Mrs. King: Let’s see. That was June. Yes. And Caroline came early August. There was not much – we met many different things. There as not much to do entertainment wise. So they – when people get to a group, they want to form a club, and they called us the College Women’s Club. We worked on entertainment to have at some point. So we started having tennis club – tennis court dances.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? You were part of the group that started that?
Mrs. King: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mrs. King: That’s right. They later – Bill Pollock would pipe the music down to the tennis courts, and that’s where I met my husband to be down there. The soldiers would come and all the young people needed a place to go for entertainment. Of course as I mentioned earlier, that old Central Cafeteria was just down the street from the tennis courts. We’d go there usually after dancing and the like. That particular night that I met my husband, my sister had just come into Oak Ridge, and Caroline and I dressed alike, so people thought we were twins, but mother had always – we were just twenty months apart, so she could buy us clothes that looked alike. We decided that we wanted to go in the same pretty dresses that we had. So for a long time people would say, “You have a twin, don’t you?” And I said, “No.” [laughter] Now as Caroline worked down in Y-12 in the inner sanctum, I call it, those – 9203. I think they’ve torn them down. That’s one, two, or three. She had worked for someone whose name I had forgotten but she had the clearance to go to all three of those buildings there.
Mr. McDaniel: What did she do?
Mrs. King: She was a secretary also.
Mr. McDaniel: She was a secretary. Well let’s go back. That’s interesting that you should mention – of course everybody’s talked about the tennis court dances. They were famous. But I’d never talked to anyone who was in the group that started those.
Mrs. King: Yeah. Well we had a little group and we worked to have it. Of course there were – all the early part of it, I remember that we would meet. I don’t remember meeting that frequently, but we were in on this group that started the tennis court dances and it was a great thing to do. When we couldn’t have it there, we’d have it up in Ridge Hall or what was Ridge Hall. I guess it was called that then. That’s where they had had the indoor dances because Bill was always there. So that’s when he piped the music down from Ridge Hall to – so we could hear it from up –
Mr. McDaniel: You know that’s interesting. I interviewed a fellow last week, a Mr. Horton, Jay Horton. Do you know Jay Horton?
Mrs. King: I know who he is, yes.
Mr. McDaniel: He was in one of the bands. He was in one of the dance bands and he played – I think he said he played trombone and upright bass. It wasn’t the Rhythm Engineers. It was the other one.
Mrs. King: Was it Bob Shannon’s group?
Mr. McDaniel: I don’t remember. He didn’t mention.
Mrs. King: Because they came along later. I don’t remember many.
Mr. McDaniel: He said they played the rec halls all the time.
Mrs. King: Okay, that came later, I believe. But I may be wrong there. I know down in Jefferson they had a band, and that was later after I was married.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, it could have been later.
Mrs. King: But this, at that time, they also had a place down at Jefferson you could dance that they later turned into a skating rink. So it was in that area that we could go to dances down there. That was after – well after – yeah, it was before Campbell came. But go ahead.
Mr. McDaniel: Let’s get back to –
Mrs. King: Oak Ridge?
Mr. McDaniel: I was getting you off track.
Mrs. King: That’s all right. I’m good at digressing.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay. So your sister came that summer in August.
Mrs. King: Yes. We lived in the same dormitory. She got assigned to the other end of the building and I was on one end of the building.
Mr. McDaniel: Well before we get to your husband, so there wasn’t really very much for you folks, you young people to do at that point.
Mrs. King: No except to go to Ridge Rec Hall.
Mr. McDaniel: Right, to the rec hall, things such as that.
Mrs. King: And at that time there was not as much. We worked seven days a week, as you understand or probably know, and that was something that if we ever got to go to North Carolina – at that time we were on Central Time in Oak Ridge. Had you been told that?
Mr. McDaniel: Mhm.
Mrs. King: And then they changed it. Therefore my mother lived still lived in Statesville, and we’d have to put together the time to call. Sometimes I would get a ride home to Statesville, and that was later because we didn’t go back and forth very much, but those dances were important because the soldiers too were lost and all these young people coming out of college needed a place for entertainment.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh sure and then to socialize and meet and get to know folks.
Mrs. King: Mhm, just primarily dancing.
Mr. McDaniel: What was it like, different? Oak Ridge in 1944 was pretty primitive.
Mrs. King: I can tell you. I was a real pioneer not only for coming out of North Carolina to work and coming to Oak Ridge, but we really felt we were doing something because it was to help win the war, Keith. That’s why I’ve always felt a – I’ve always said I was a Tar Heel born and Tar Heel bred and dead but this has been my home since 1944 and we walked boardwalks and we had at that time we had to have coupons to get shoes which were plastic heels. If we wanted a new pair of shoes, we had to go to Knoxville to ride the busses or the trailers. They really were like cattle cars and you just would sit on long benches inside that. But the boardwalks – now Caroline, after she came, lived in a dorm at Townsite that one of those three that was in the concourse up there across from Central Cafeteria. That was – I digressed. Where was I?
Mr. McDaniel: That’s okay. You were talking about going home. You were talking about the difference between Statesville and Oak Ridge.
Mrs. King: Yes. Here it was truly mud. I have pictures and we had to walk boardwalks to get all the way to the top of my hill. We walked boardwalks at town site and the boards were an inch or so and you’d catch a heel in the boardwalk and the mud. We’d carry our shoes sometimes because we didn’t want to ruin our little plastic heels. But things were – you didn’t have rubber heels then and rubber soles because they were using it for the war. So it was a special place for us and I never thought I’d end up in Tennessee, but I did.
Mr. McDaniel: All right, so tell me about – you met your husband at a – or your husband to be at a dance. Tell me about that.
Mrs. King: Yes. I knew right away. That sounds strange. First of all, he asked me to dance and then we went over and stood – I’ve always love to dance – I’m a jitterbug. I was a jitterbug. Knew how to dance the jitterbug and liked that and I realized though, when he asked me, he was different and I thought, “Okay.” So he was from the Philadelphia, Delaware area and his relatives lived over right – his grandparents did in Delaware. I thought, “Well he’s soft-spoken and I just like this person,” and we talked and we went in – there was an old tree which I never did get – this was outside the fence of the tennis courts, and we stood there and talked and talked and talked and I said, “Now that’s my sister Caroline up there.” Then we danced and had a good time. Then many dates later I realized that – and I wrote to my mother that I believe he’s the one that I would like to marry someday. So it’s just – it was just like that. I met him at the tennis court dances and many of my friends met their husbands at the tennis court dances.
Mr. McDaniel: I’m sure. Now was he –
Mrs. King: He was stationed with the Special Engineer Detachment and he was called in from Louisiana. I could have looked that up but I didn’t. He had been stationed down there and then came here to work for the captain. They were to receive these new, young recruits who were in the Army, and Campbell worked under the captain at that time to do the paperwork on those young men who came in.
Mr. McDaniel: And his name was Campbell King.
Mrs. King: Campbell King. C-A-M-P-B-E-L-L. We dated on and on and occasionally I would date someone else and he dated someone else. That was for one –
Mr. McDaniel: As young people do.
Mrs. King: As young people do, yes.
Mr. McDaniel: So when did you all get married?
Mrs. King: Not till ’46.
Mr. McDaniel: For a couple of years, not too many.
Mrs. King: March of ’46.
Mr. McDaniel: Almost two years.
Mrs. King: I was in a very bad automobile accident in October of ’45 here in Oak Ridge. It was a foggy night and the moonlight was out, and I can see the moonlight, the fog, and then the river or the land. Somehow or other it – we ended up – there were five of us – no it was six of us, three couples. Yeah, that’s right. My sister Caroline was on the front seat and the other two couples, you can always get the other person in somehow or other. So anyway it was a very – I was hospitalized at the Oak Ridge hospital for eight weeks.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, my goodness.
Mrs. King: When I got out, the captain took my husband, Campbell and me over the mountains because his wife was over there, and he took us over there to my mother’s, where I was to recuperate. I stayed – we had already planned – he had asked me to marry him in early October – no, in August. This was early October around the 18th. So it wasn’t early.
Mr. McDaniel: But ’45.
Mrs. King: ’45. Then the gates weren’t open and the Red Cross notified mother the next morning and of course she couldn’t – had a hard time getting contact with the hospital because the – our doctors were stationed – they came from Rochester. Yeah, Rochester. But they were Army. We had great doctors. Campbell was injured and was hospitalized. I have a picture taken. He was the sergeant, they took his picture for the old – have you seen one of those old SED yearbooks?
Mr. McDaniel: Yes, ma’am. I sure have.
Mrs. King: Well Campbell’s picture’s in the front of that yearbook. He had – they borrowed a doctor’s desk and put his name on it so they could get him in the yearbook.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mrs. King: Yeah. If you’ve seen one of those, that’s where Campbell is.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, okay.
Mrs. King: But anyway I was –
Mr. McDaniel: So was your sister injured?
Mrs. King: Yes, but not as badly, and fortunately she was still here and kept on plugging along. Fortunately Christmas did come in there, but that happened in October. For my family, my sister – everybody had to send things. My sister and her husband came to visit us at – I think that was in – well it was before I was married, so it was in the fall sometime. She had to get special permission to come in.
Mr. McDaniel: While you were in the hospital she came and visited you?
Mrs. King: Yes. Of course, Caroline was here, but they had – mother didn’t get here at that time. Yes – I can’t quite – I’ve been trying to put it together when mother came because they had to meet her and mother stayed at the guesthouse then. Both – but then later we stayed – we had planned to be married at the end of January. We had already talked about it. Of course, the accident said, “Wait.” So we went over the mountains and I stayed at mother’s and we started planning and decided to go ahead, but we moved it forward to March.
Mr. McDaniel: March. Now, did you come back?
Mrs. King: No, I did not.
Mr. McDaniel: You did not come back, okay.
Mrs. King: No, not till after we were married, because I was still technically on Tennessee Eastman’s payroll and it was the kind of thing that was worked out between Tennessee Eastman and however they’ll work it out, but they knew I was recuperating. When I was married, then they sort of worked it out. Then I just retired from Eastman. That was in the spring or early summer after we came.
Mr. McDaniel: So you got married in March of ’46.
Mrs. King: Yes, March 23rd.
Mr. McDaniel: And you came back to Oak Ridge.
Mrs. King: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: So, as a couple, you and Campbell came back as a couple?
Mrs. King: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: So where did you live?
Mrs. King: Well let’s see. First of all, he called me when we were still planning the – then he said – Campbell had already been hired by Union Carbide. He had been dismissed from the Army right at the same time.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s what I was about to ask. He had been discharged from the Army.
Mrs. King: Yes, he was discharged, yes. So he called and he said, “They have a house for us.” I said, “Where is it?” I didn’t know all the ifs, ands or whatever at that time, not that I know that much now. But anyway, he said, “They have a house, a “B” house and it’s up on Outer Drive.” Well, I later found out where it was. I said, “Campbell what would I do?” I said, “Caroline is out there and she could help you.” This lady, this friend of mother’s said, “Well, Mary Anne, you could have always taken a crate in and used it as a table,” but I knew we had to have furniture because they weren’t furnished. The apartments were furnished. So we rented a home. So I said, “Campbell, I don’t know what to say except, do you feel we could get the house?” He didn’t want that responsibility at that time. So we got a furnished apartment. I’m leading up to something. The ones that are now considered the slums that they want to tear down, that was where we lived.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mrs. King: Yes. My sister who lived in Statesville, she and her husband let me bring their Packard back over the mountains with our wedding gifts. As we – we stayed at the Guest House our first night, because the company had arranged for us to stay there. Then we went to Hillside Road and rented one of those houses which were furnished, those apartments. At that time, principals lived there, young scientists who worked out at X-10 and others.
Mr. McDaniel: Those were nice apartments then.
Mrs. King: They were nice apartments. Even now when one of my daughters and I were – she said, “Let me go see these apartments that look so terrible.” Well he had sort of had them painted on the outside. I won’t use names here. But she said – I said, “We passed it, Nancy.” I said, “It was that one in the middle that they’ve fixed up nicely.” She said, “Well, it must be on the inside because she didn’t think they looked that bad.” It’s shame that those three buildings had –
Mr. McDaniel: It is a shame. Oh, yeah.
Mrs. King: In an area that it was a nice apartment. I know Campbell and I bought John Quill’s – we lived there five years, and our first baby was born there and we moved to the “B” house around the corner on Nixon after she was two months old. But the whole thing was that was a good area and it was all young couples had and it was furnished. But at the end of the first – about the ’46, ’47, we were allowed to get rid of the furnished apartment and rent – and buy our own furniture. So we did. We went into Halls and Blankenship and bought some beautiful furniture. That couch over there is one of the original pieces. But the whole thing is you could get good furniture in Knoxville which we didn’t have here at the time. So we bought our own furniture, but we still paid the full amount as though we were renting the furniture. Then we lived there for five years. Somewhere in that time, they built the Garden Apartments, and they wanted all these young couples who lived on Hillside and up off Highland View, they wanted them to move out of those Hillside apartments. So we made plans to move up the hill. But we found out that we could still pay for that furniture and still keep it. We found it out the night before we were to move. So we stayed there until we could get a house. At that time you had to have a child. Had we known all that earlier, they might have put us out of our “B” house because they did put many people out if they didn’t have children. And at the time we were married, we of course had no children. That’s why I say you learn things as you go along.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s exactly right. So what was it like for you two and how long were you married before you had your first child?
Mrs. King: Five years.
Mr. McDaniel: Just like me and my wife. We were married five years before –
Mrs. King: Is that right?
Mr. McDaniel: It’s interesting. You were talking about that Hillside. Our very first house was 102 Pleasant Road which was just right behind those apartments.
Mrs. King: That’s right – yes. That was Hunter Apartments. Now see, we didn’t live there. We lived up here. The Hunter Apartments – I didn’t – they were going to put us all out, and I did – we covered all those from Hillside up to just beyond Hillside and Highland. They tore that one down first so that they’d get something built there. But anyway, we went to all those apartments and said, “Did you want to move out?” This was a socialized – what do you call it? You live under – they tell you what to do? Social?
Mr. McDaniel: Sure it is. Yes.
Mrs. King: What is the word – is it social? What’s the –
Mr. McDaniel: Well it’s a – yeah, I know what you’re saying. I can’t remember.
Mrs. King: Yes. But I did – I got – and I found out how many didn’t want to move. It was a hundred and forty-some out of a hundred and sixty-some. So I turned it in. We wrote letters to the senator, Kefauver, it was at the time, and another one, but here in Oak Ridge you had to do what they told you uptown.
Mr. McDaniel: What they told you to do. Right. It was a government town and basically had to do what they told you to do.
Mrs. King: Government town. It’s amazing that that has just begun to leave and people still know it’s a government town, but it’s not as much. If you bought a house, someone would walk across your yard. Well this is government. And I said, “No this isn’t government anymore. It’s our town. And even if it weren’t – I mean our home.” But it’s – you know, parents would say, “You can do anything you want to,” to some of their children. So we moved to Nolan Road and when our baby was only – Anne Todd is her name, and we moved over there on Memorial Day Weekend and it was the coldest Memorial Day they’d ever had that we had.
Mr. McDaniel: What year was that?
Mrs. King: We wouldn’t light the furnace because you used coal to get warm and they had just painted the interior of the house, and we didn’t want it to –
Mr. McDaniel: To get all black?
Mrs. King: Right, exactly.
Mr. McDaniel: My goodness.
Mrs. King: So we fixed a place in the kitchen that we could turn on the stove so we could bathe her. That just lasted a couple of days. As you know Oak Ridge or Tennessee, you turn around and the weather changes.
Mr. McDaniel: Of course.
Mrs. King: That’s how it was. We had that little two bedroom “B”.
Mr. McDaniel: Now what year did you move to Nolan?
Mrs. King: In the same year Anne Todd was born, 1951. She was born in March 24th of 1951.
Mr. McDaniel: Well let’s go back and let me ask you, what was it like for you, you and your husband, those first five years, no children? You’re still young. The war was over and what was it like in Oak Ridge for you all?
Mrs. King: Well Campbell and I believed in supporting the towns around us, the cities. I call it ‘Knoxtown,’ but it’s Knoxville. But anyway, we would go to the ballets and a series and also I must go back a few minutes. At Grove Center in Oak Ridge, which was – at that time, you could go by bus to get to, you could go to – they brought in outside entertainment just as they brought in one of the Dorsey Orchestras to play at Grove Center, Recreation Hall. When we were married, Grove Center was just down the hill from us. We would go to Grove Theater down there and up at the old – where the playhouse – well up there, up at Townsite and they’ve put offices in there now and I don’t know how to tell you what is – well, what is there now?
Mr. McDaniel: The Ridge Theater?
Mrs. King: The Ridge Theater, yeah. And then there was the Sim –
Mr. McDaniel: There’s the Recreation Hall right there on the corner. Where that came along later I guess right across from the Guest House.
Mrs. King: No, no. We went there, too. Yes. But we did more going to Knoxville if we could. If they had dances they usually used a hotel ballroom or something like that. Not many of the young people had cars at that time. So we’d get rides with other people. For – you asked what we did. We would go to on busses to Knoxville and mostly we would – and we had friends here who had homes and we could go to see them. As young married couples, you’d have friends in different parts of town. So then as to doing things, another thing, Campbell and I believed in supporting UT. He was an avid sports person. We got season tickets to UT ballgames.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? Football games?
Mrs. King: Yeah, UT football games and we had them right on the 50-yard line. Now, of course, they would take those away from us now, but anyway we did.
Mr. McDaniel: So how long did you have those tickets for? How many years?
Mrs. King: I could go back to – if I could under my bed and pull out all my scrapbook material – I started to do that, Keith, but I can’t bend easily now.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s okay.
Mrs. King: But I have a lot of the old programs. I’d say we had them for two to three years and it was – that’s when they began. Campbell and I believed in “Don’t talk against them. Join them.” But they were not supported by all these people who had come from different states. We were a melting pot, and I guess to a great degree we’re still a melting pot. But we had people from every state in the union and across the seas.
Mr. McDaniel: But you know probably you came from a family that was probably more exposed to that kind of thing than others were because your father was an attorney. He was a professional person and he probably had interaction with folks that were not always like you.
Mrs. King: Yeah. When mother and father went on their honeymoon to New York, they went to opera while they were up there. So you see, they were, each of them, they were well educated and they believed in education and helping their children. Yes. Another thing we believed in was the historical spots. That was – Mary Anne grew up knowing old historical spots and that’s what half my collections are, historical items that I give to the children about old places in my hometown. I supported Blount Mansion and Ramsey House and those places that they didn’t seem to have an interest. I was asked by the Knoxville ladies whom I had met through DAR. I was a member of Daughters of the American Revolution. So I met different people in different fields. It was – you have to grow with a – we took both the Knoxville papers. We took the – it wasn’t called The Oak Ridger at the time, the little Oak Leaf, I believe it was called.
Mr. McDaniel: The Oak Leaf or the Journal or Oak Ridge Journal?
Mrs. King: It wasn’t that, the book – but we took all of those before and we had a little Army paper that used to come out that I had, and I’ve always believed in knowing your area, and even to this day I’ll find out where one town is and I’ll say, “Oh it’s that direction,” and yet it’s so close and yet so far, just because you don’t have a chance to visit it.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Exactly. So your daughter was born, you said, in ’51?
Mrs. King: Yes. We lived then at 100 Nolan Road. And then Nancy was born in – Nancy Campbell we named her – in May of ’53.
Mr. McDaniel: ’53, okay.
Mrs. King: Yes. Our children went to Pine Valley School and were quite active there. And we were through different means, [laughter] the good old PTA, raising funds and having carnivals and things like that.
Mr. McDaniel: Of course. Now, when did you move to Nixon?
Mrs. King: When we were allowed to buy – let’s see, we had bought our “B” house. We were allowed to buy that. Everybody could at that time.
Mr. McDaniel: Right, everybody. That was in the mid-50s.
Mrs. King: Yes, it was about –
Mr. McDaniel: ’56?
Mrs. King: Well, we moved in ’56, but we lived there before we bought this one. We bought it from the people who were moving out of Oak Ridge and we had tried to buy other “D”s and they were taken. So it turns out that this was to be our home, and I was glad because the girls could move there and bring around in little wagons and things they wanted to move. So we did move here and stayed probably fifty – let’s see. Let me close my eyes. One from six, five. In ’56.
Mr. McDaniel: In ’56. So you moved here in ’56.
Mrs. King: 101 Nixon.
Mr. McDaniel: And you’ve been here ever since.
Mrs. King: Yes. And we’ve added on, and we had these bookcases built and the mantel put in, and the things around the ceiling and the baseboards that I had grown up with. Now, I grew up with ten foot ceilings, but I had to get used to not having those. [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: I’m sure. Now your husband, what did he do for his career?
Mrs. King: Oh. He was with Union Carbide and I think they called it Industrial Engineering. We were not allowed to ask, Keith, and having worked in the Security Department, I still have that feeling about Oak Ridge. I don’t ask you where you work. I don’t ask you where you live. That’s how we were taught. There was a sign going out of Oak Ridge at the time then. The man had his finger like that. In other words, as you go out don’t say a word. And that was, even later, they had that billboard up as we went out of Oak Ridge over the railroad tracks that way.
Mr. McDaniel: They still have billboards up now going out of Oak Ridge towards Kingston. They’ve still got some new security billboards.
Mrs. King: See that, I had heard that but I didn’t know where it was because I don’t get over that way as much.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Out past K-25 right before you cross the river.
Mrs. King: Well I used to go out that way to get I-40. It’s exactly twelve miles from our house to where the old K-25 entrance is. I have all things down to a pat. [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Of course. So your kids grew up in Oak Ridge. Your husband had a job. Now did once the kids were – did you remain a homemaker or did you go back to work?
Mrs. King: No. I did a lot of volunteering and being active with the groups, different groups. In 1960 I received a notice from Paul Bjork who was then head of the Hospital saying that they would like a group – he said, “You’ve been recommended to be part of a group to organize a volunteer group.” There were twenty-four or five who came and then they gradually dropped out and we ended up with five members of that group who planned and asked and we would – let’s say your name was recommended as – it was only women at that time, and just say you’ve been recommended to be a volunteer and this would be your plan. So we worked on that and getting different ones who would be with us when we officially opened. We met from January through March, and at that time had our first general meeting.
Mr. McDaniel: And what year was that?
Mrs. King: That was 1962.
Mr. McDaniel: ’62, okay.
Mrs. King: Then that was January ’62, and we had a terrible snowstorm there. Different ones of us – I fell out in the snow and another lady fell and broke her leg and we’d have to have meetings in between, but some of us could go. But we ended up with five different ones who were that. I’m the only – on that – of the original group who still works, but there’s another one who’s still living of that five.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mrs. King: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: Were those the ‘Gray Ladies,’ as they called them?
Mrs. King: No, no. The Gray Ladies were there, and they had been doing a great job for the Red Cross, but they were not part at that time of the volunteer group. Now we who went in, but there was some kind of – I don’t know, something between the Red Cross and the Hospital that they had to be different.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, of course.
Mrs. King: So the Gray Ladies still stayed and they did their part, but we originally – as we met as a group, we knew what we would do was to have a group that could have a – open a gift shop and it was there for the patients, for those who came to see the patients and for the employees if they needed something. Just was a very small spot. Then we had discussed different things. Some of them wanted to work with patients more and others of us were to have this turnover. We had three different shifts in the gift shop. So we had to fill those spots. I worked twice a week every other week at the time, a Monday morning and a Thursday night, because we had the two different shifts plus the afternoon one. But the whole thing was they needed night people and we discussed it. I discussed it with my children and my husband and I said, “This is what would be even when I took another job with the Woman’s Club,” which I had been active with. I said, “They’ve asked me to do this and this will take a lot of time, but I’m just going to sign up with it for one year or two.” At that time we only nominated officers for one year. But I believed in discussing these things with the family. I think it was important because the children were still active and going to dance classes and those kinds of things and cheerleading. Campbell and I were avid supporters of the Wildcats and had season tickets to that.
Mr. McDaniel: You only had the two daughters, right?
Mrs. King: Two daughters.
Mr. McDaniel: So you stayed active then.
Mrs. King: Yes, yes. I’m still – as I said, I still can go down and give – what do you call it – support to the one who’s handling the computer cash register.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. That’s good. At the Gift Shop?
Mrs. King: Yes, at the Gift Shop at the Hospital. Now there are many who came in later, but they were not – they were the ones who started out once we opened. But I’m the only one of the original group still there.
Mr. McDaniel: Looking back over the years that you’ve lived in Oak Ridge, how have you seen Oak Ridge change for the good or for the worse, whatever?
Mrs. King: I never think of things going worse. I’m a very positive person. You have to adjust to everything you do. You may not like the way things are going, but it was a pleasant change to have the new Municipal Building built and the Library built because the original library was part of the original Ridge Rec Hall. I guess you know that, too.
Mr. McDaniel: Yes, ma’am.
Mrs. King: The whole thing is that these buildings were a beginning. I think it’s always nice to have people come in. It’s not the prettiest of sculpture, but that sculpture is different down there. It’s more modern. But those who were graduating the same year I was, their sculpture at Woman’s College has that same field as – presentation, and I say, “Who are we to say if an artist feels something that it’s not the way it’s to be?” You grow to like it. We joined the playhouse. Campbell acted in one play. It was Edward, My Son. [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mrs. King: Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: What year was that?
Mrs. King: The year Paul’s son was born, and he named him Edward. [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: Really? Is that right?
Mrs. King: Yeah. I don’t remember the year right now.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mrs. King: But we were asked to join the Oak Ridge Dance Club, one of the originals. There again, that had to go through – even with the DAR – all of the clubs had to go through USED, AEC – had to come through there in order to get permission to even have a group here. They had had a group before the gates opened. I joined the group when it was the original – they called it the Samuel Whitney Chapter after someone’s ancestor. We later decided to name it something that was more indicative of this area. So it’s called the Clinch Ben Chapter. That’s why I think these are things that – it’s not that there were not things to do. We joined the Friends of the Library at the time and tried to support things. Campbell was always interested in government and he’d go to the meetings and with young children, I didn’t always get to go to the same things. We helped build St. Stephens, our church, the Episcopal church. There was just always something to do. There’s never been a lack of things to do in Oak Ridge.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. So when did you lose your husband?
Mrs. King: He died in 19 – just a minute. I have to close my eyes.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s okay.
Mrs. King: Let’s see. Campbell died first – 1986.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, ’86.
Mrs. King: February the 10th of 1986 and mother died in 1990.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, really?
Mrs. King: So I have a brother who died in 1960. So I’m sort of going along as different ones – I’m real good at dates until I get there.
Mr. McDaniel: I understand.
Mrs. King: We went back and forth. He loved my family and going to North Carolina. His family lived at the time in Ardmore, Pennsylvania right outside of Philadelphia. We’d go up there to visit. We’d go to North Carolina to visit. We believed in family gatherings. Campbell liked my sisters and I have two sisters who are deceased and one who’s still living, lives in California. It’s Caroline who lives out there.
Mr. McDaniel: Now is she the one that came to Oak Ridge with you?
Mrs. King: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, okay. How long was she in Oak Ridge? Did she leave after the war?
Mrs. King: She stayed on. I know when we were married she was out here. That was ’46 and I think she entered – she went back to get her – she was taking a commercial – she’d had two years at Mitchell and decided to go on and get this commercial degree so she could end up coming to help in the war. I mean doing it. At the time we didn’t know we were coming to Oak Ridge, but she decided to go ahead and go back to get her real degree. She went there and Chapel Hill and the University of North Carolina but she went to Woman’s College and the University of North Carolina and did get her degree and went back to get that in North Carolina.
Mr. McDaniel: Then she ended up moving to California at some point.
Mrs. King: Yes. At first when she was married she lived in New York. That’s where her husband was in business, and then they moved to California. They have one daughter and the daughter still lives out there. We have double names in our family and three Delights. My sister was a Nancy Delight, one of my sisters. She had a daughter named Nancy Delight. Then Caroline named her daughter Delight Louise and then another – it goes down the road, and if you hear a Delight you know it came from our family.
Mr. McDaniel: Where are your daughters now?
Mrs. King: Well let’s see. Nancy – Anne Todd and her husband live in Knoxville and they’re going to be moving to Florida soon. This is – they like the warm weather down there. My son-in-law is still in business. He has a group that’s – he feels it’s more connected to large areas. So he and Anne Todd have been down there looking at houses. Both of them – our daughters – were graduated from University of Tennessee. Nancy is an attorney at law. I say that because my father – I had this sign that said, “Attorney at Law,” and that’s what we always went by. He’s an attorney at law.
Mr. McDaniel: Attorney at law. That’s right.
Mrs. King: Yeah. But anyway, Nancy has her own office and she worked for the state for several years, the Transportation Department and an attorney down there. She went from college down there and got a job. Her husband is in landscaping – I mean, not landscaping.
Mr. McDaniel: Architecture?
Mrs. King: No, you go out and – surveying. He’s a surveyor – he has his own surveying business.
Mr. McDaniel: Surveying, yes right. Now where does she live?
Mrs. King: They live in Hendersonville. They have a home, but her office is in Nashville, and his office is upstairs. They bought an old building there on 21st Street. It’s right near the Vanderbilt campus, not too far away. And Anne Todd worked in marketing for a long time. Now she does – Anne Todd went back – she had to go back to get an – she had a marketing degree, has it but in order to teach English as a second language, which she started out doing as a volunteer in Knoxville, she realized she needed a teacher’s license and she got that and then she also got – had a major in English as a Second Language to get her higher degree, Master’s. So she still does that to people who come to Knoxville or this area who need to be directed in that English.
Mr. McDaniel: She needs to be in Oak Ridge doesn’t she?
Mrs. King: Well, yes. She teaches these who come from Korea and go to UT. The families come over. For a while she was teaching and going to – oh, I could get her schedule. I’m so turned around I didn’t know how she did it, but she did that in private and has really enjoyed that.
Mr. McDaniel: Well is there anything else that I’ve not asked you about that you’d like to talk about?
Mrs. King: I don’t know. You just keep on asking and I’ll try to go to it.
Mr. McDaniel: It sounds like you and your husband, you had a full life in Oak Ridge and were very active.
Mrs. King: We did, yes. We have many good friends here. It’s the kind of – he played tennis down on the tennis courts. As he – after he retired even, he was active in the tennis – they’d go down – then he later joined the – what they called the Snowbird Group. They’d go down in cold weather no matter how cold it was and play tennis early in the mornings.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mrs. King: Yes. [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, my goodness.
Mrs. King: And then it’s just different things that have happened. I know there’s so many things that I could bring you up to date with and I’m sure you’ve had them all covered though in your interviewing.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s okay. That’s all right. This is about you.
Mrs. King: I know. Well I’m still active in DAR and I still like supporting everything in Oak Ridge, that is the Art Center, and these places that some of us – and I still send money to some of the – well I have stopped the Knoxville groups because I believe in supporting Oak Ridge and the Children’s Museum. I could have joined each one of these, but monetary support is as important as active participation, that is, in filling in. So I have supported several of these. I still support the Iredell Museum in Statesville, North Carolina.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mrs. King: Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: Well good for you.
Mrs. King: I send money to Mitchell College in memory of my mother. I did it as a special scholarship fund for a while but they wanted to include it. But that’s how I send it, started it off as a scholarship fund to mother.
Mr. McDaniel: Well that’s good.
Mrs. King: I think you have to remain active, and mother and father both, as I said, believed in education. Since I was – I’m part of the hometown and will always be – there’s no – I have many cousins left in Statesville, but it’s something that I always have a spot in my heart for each one who’s there.
Mr. McDaniel: Well thank you so much for taking the time to speak to us –
Mrs. King: Well thank you for coming.
Mr. McDaniel: – and reminiscing and talking about your life and you and your husband, family’s life here in Oak Ridge.
Mrs. King: Yes, and the children are still very much a part of Oak Ridge. I think that they always come home. In fact Nancy’s coming back for her class reunion this weekend.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, well, good.
Mrs. King: Each of them – I should have mentioned my grandchildren. Anne Todd and her family have two children, a boy and a girl. Nancy has the one daughter. They’re much a part of my – if you look around my house I have pictures of everybody. There, all – that’s my mother. But I’m always surrounded by those I love.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, well, good.
Mrs. King: Yes. It’s just a part of me.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Well thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Mrs. King: Thank you Keith.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay.
[end of recording]

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ORAL HISTORY OF MARY ANNE KING
Interviewed and filmed by Keith McDaniel
June 16, 2011
Mr. McDaniel: This is Keith McDaniel and today is June the 16th, 2011 and I am here in Oak Ridge with Mrs. Mary Anne King. Thank you, Mrs. King, for taking the time to talk to us. Tell me about where you were born and raised and something about your family.
Mrs. King: I was born in Statesville, North Carolina and my mother and father had six children and I was along the road. Mother – they lost one and then had another. I went to Statesville High School and Mitchell Community College there for two years. I had three sisters and two brothers but one baby brother is deceased now. That’s all you needed to know there. Then we were fortunate in having a college in our hometown. As I said, I attended that. Then went on to Greensboro, North Carolina to attend Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina and got my graduate degree there. It was while I was at Greensboro that I was recruited by someone from Tennessee Eastman. The war had started in 1941 and they were recruiting people to come out here to work. Mr. McDaniel: Let’s go back. Let me ask you a question before we get to that. What did your parents do?
Mrs. King: My father was an attorney at law and my mother was a homemaker. She had attended a college earlier over in Greensboro. It was called State Normal and she taught school.
Mr. McDaniel: If it was a ‘Normal,’ it was probably a teacher’s college, wasn’t it?
Mrs. King: It was. She got her teacher’s degree there. And my grandmother and grandfather were there, her parents. My father’s parents lived up the road and he was – I was a Bristol, B-R-I-S-T-O-L. Father died fairly young and mother was left widowed with five children living. So is there something else that you –
Mr. McDaniel: I guess you grew up during the depression at that time?
Mrs. King: Oh yes. 1929.
Mr. McDaniel: What was that like? Now your father – you said your father was an attorney.
Mrs. King: Yes, but father was very ill towards the last four years of his life, but he still went to his law office and other things.
Mr. McDaniel: But with five kids, even a professional like that, I’m sure it was tough, wasn’t it?
Mrs. King: It was, yes. You know what it’s like when someone says, “Are we going to have something tonight?” We didn’t suffer, but we learned to economize, every one of us, and to save. I think that was important. When one of the banks failed in my hometown – it was First National Bank – I even at that age had a bank account, a savings account. In later years, they were paying back and I’d go down and collect my ten cents per whatever it was that I had. But I knew what it was to save and what it was to know that people were going through hard times, including my father. And later Mother went back and learned some business – well learned how to do shorthand and type and was able to continue that after father died. So then I grew up just a normal family with friends around and relatives.
Mr. McDaniel: So you were in college. You went to Greensboro.
Mrs. King: Yes. To finish my –
Mr. McDaniel: To finish your degree.
Mrs. King: My education.
Mr. McDaniel: What year was that when you finished?
Mrs. King: I finished on D-Day, June 6th, 1944.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mrs. King: Yes. That morning, my mother had come over for the service, I mean the graduation ceremony. I said to my roommate. I said, “Something special, I feel it, is happening today.” Well it was D-Day and this came out – it was going on while we were graduating, I mean, having the ceremony. But the governor of North Carolina spoke. That was then. It was earlier that, while I was still at Greensboro, that the head of the Business College came and said that, to different ones of us, he said that, “They are recruiting and we’d like you to go up to talk with them,” and explained what it was. It was someone from Tennessee Eastman. And we came – is that – can I go on to the next step?
Mr. McDaniel: No, you’re good. Yeah, sure. Go ahead.
Mrs. King: My sister and another friend from Statesville came out for interviews in April of that year, and we came by Southern Railroad up to Knoxville and stayed in the Andrew Johnson Hotel and our first stop for dinner was the old Regas Cafe there where they serve the best steaks that one could ever want.
Mr. McDaniel: Absolutely.
Mrs. King: The next morning we were picked up by someone from Tennessee Eastman and were brought to Oak Ridge. That lady took us on a tour, using up time, and we drove all the way up Oak Ridge Turnpike and she said, “Now, up on this hill is where you’re going to live in dormitories,” and they were not built at that time. It’s where the Garden Apartments are now.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Now what year was that that you came?
Mrs. King: 1944.
Mr. McDaniel: So it was ’44.
Mrs. King: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: So the war was still going on?
Mrs. King: Oh yes. We came in April of ’44 out here for an interview and we were – after she showed us around town and said, “That’s” – well she said, “You’re going to be living here.” Well we did – I did live on the top row, and we had – that’s another part. We had to climb this long walk up to the – the busses didn’t go up to the top of that hill. And then we had to walk up when we got off. We either went by – we’d walk down in the mornings to catch a trailer or a bus to take us to Y-12 or whichever place we were working.
Mr. McDaniel: Let me ask you a question. Speaking of that hill, was there a nickname for that hill? Because I’ve heard a nickname for that hill.
Mrs. King: Well at the time there might have been. I don’t – I remember Adam’s Cafeteria was down there, but they also served breakfast at Y-12 at that time and we could get a breakfast if we went early enough.
Mr. McDaniel: Well I meant the dormitories up where the Garden Apartments are. I had a fellow I was interviewing once and he said, “You know,” he said, “They go to the women’s dormitories and say, ‘Next stop, Old Maid’s Hill,” is what he said. [laughter]
Mrs. King: No! I didn’t know that, because we were not really old maids.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, I know.
Mrs. King: We were just young children out of college.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure.
Mrs. King: So this is the kind of thing that they had up on that hill, above even the last hill, they had grills up there as they used to have one up behind the church at [Jackson Square] – up where the Chapel on the Hill is – they had grills up there that you could go have picnics for those who worked down in that area.
Mr. McDaniel: So you came in the spring in April ’44 for the visit.
Mrs. King: And then were interviewed by several people down at Y-12.
Mr. McDaniel: You and your sister?
Mrs. King: Now, Caroline – yes, she was interviewed. She has – because they took our pictures. I can remember our badge numbers, 16345. Yes. Then Caroline, because she was to come later, and we were told we would hear from them. And that was the interview. We stayed for a while. We had to go through security to – it was at the top of Y-12, I mean the security house was. We entered some kind of pass to get that far. It turns out that I worked in that building later. It was the security building where the badges were given out and my boss worked there.
Mr. McDaniel: But you all came in ’44 for the interview.
Mrs. King: Yes, April, and I came back after graduation, which was in June of ’44.
Mr. McDaniel: In June of ’44, right.
Mrs. King: Yes. I had to get everything packed up to return and they were aware that I would have two or three weeks off and would come back in June. So I did.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, well, good. Now, did your sister come too?
Mrs. King: Caroline was coming later, and she came in August.
Mr. McDaniel: But when you came in June, you lived up on the women’s dormitories where the Garden Apartments are and you went to work at Y-12.
Mrs. King: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: What did you do there? Who did you work for?
Mrs. King: I worked for security. Mr. Gibson was his name, and he was – they had several in there. They had those who made the badges in the room behind me, and they had this little inner room where the secretary group was and his desk. Then out front was where they gave the badges out, and that’s when sometimes Mr. Gibson wanted me or one of the other girls to give the badges to the officers who came in. So everyone who went down in the plant had to have – if you lost your badge you had to come in that building to get a new badge or something to go down, because they had to walk through guards, and I guess you’ve heard that also, that everybody had to show a badge at a window.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, sure, of course.
Mrs. King: Even we who left the building had to make sure if we went down into the cafeteria that we had to show our badges to the guards as we – even though we were familiar to their faces. So we had to do that there.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Absolutely. So I bet you met a lot of people in that job, didn’t you?
Mrs. King: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: You met just everybody that came to Y-12, didn’t you?
Mrs. King: Yes. We had to talk with security up at – at that time it was USED and then it became AEC, didn’t it?
Mr. McDaniel: Yes.
Mrs. King: Then now it’s – is it still AEC?
Mr. McDaniel: Now it’s DOE.
Mrs. King: DOE, excuse me. I didn’t keep up with the last one.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s okay. That’s all right.
Mrs. King: But I do, most memories. But the USED was the United States Energy –
Mr. McDaniel: Energy Department. Yes, ma’am.
Mrs. King: Let’s see. That was June. Yes. And Caroline came early August. There was not much – we met many different things. There as not much to do entertainment wise. So they – when people get to a group, they want to form a club, and they called us the College Women’s Club. We worked on entertainment to have at some point. So we started having tennis club – tennis court dances.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? You were part of the group that started that?
Mrs. King: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mrs. King: That’s right. They later – Bill Pollock would pipe the music down to the tennis courts, and that’s where I met my husband to be down there. The soldiers would come and all the young people needed a place to go for entertainment. Of course as I mentioned earlier, that old Central Cafeteria was just down the street from the tennis courts. We’d go there usually after dancing and the like. That particular night that I met my husband, my sister had just come into Oak Ridge, and Caroline and I dressed alike, so people thought we were twins, but mother had always – we were just twenty months apart, so she could buy us clothes that looked alike. We decided that we wanted to go in the same pretty dresses that we had. So for a long time people would say, “You have a twin, don’t you?” And I said, “No.” [laughter] Now as Caroline worked down in Y-12 in the inner sanctum, I call it, those – 9203. I think they’ve torn them down. That’s one, two, or three. She had worked for someone whose name I had forgotten but she had the clearance to go to all three of those buildings there.
Mr. McDaniel: What did she do?
Mrs. King: She was a secretary also.
Mr. McDaniel: She was a secretary. Well let’s go back. That’s interesting that you should mention – of course everybody’s talked about the tennis court dances. They were famous. But I’d never talked to anyone who was in the group that started those.
Mrs. King: Yeah. Well we had a little group and we worked to have it. Of course there were – all the early part of it, I remember that we would meet. I don’t remember meeting that frequently, but we were in on this group that started the tennis court dances and it was a great thing to do. When we couldn’t have it there, we’d have it up in Ridge Hall or what was Ridge Hall. I guess it was called that then. That’s where they had had the indoor dances because Bill was always there. So that’s when he piped the music down from Ridge Hall to – so we could hear it from up –
Mr. McDaniel: You know that’s interesting. I interviewed a fellow last week, a Mr. Horton, Jay Horton. Do you know Jay Horton?
Mrs. King: I know who he is, yes.
Mr. McDaniel: He was in one of the bands. He was in one of the dance bands and he played – I think he said he played trombone and upright bass. It wasn’t the Rhythm Engineers. It was the other one.
Mrs. King: Was it Bob Shannon’s group?
Mr. McDaniel: I don’t remember. He didn’t mention.
Mrs. King: Because they came along later. I don’t remember many.
Mr. McDaniel: He said they played the rec halls all the time.
Mrs. King: Okay, that came later, I believe. But I may be wrong there. I know down in Jefferson they had a band, and that was later after I was married.
Mr. McDaniel: Yeah, it could have been later.
Mrs. King: But this, at that time, they also had a place down at Jefferson you could dance that they later turned into a skating rink. So it was in that area that we could go to dances down there. That was after – well after – yeah, it was before Campbell came. But go ahead.
Mr. McDaniel: Let’s get back to –
Mrs. King: Oak Ridge?
Mr. McDaniel: I was getting you off track.
Mrs. King: That’s all right. I’m good at digressing.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay. So your sister came that summer in August.
Mrs. King: Yes. We lived in the same dormitory. She got assigned to the other end of the building and I was on one end of the building.
Mr. McDaniel: Well before we get to your husband, so there wasn’t really very much for you folks, you young people to do at that point.
Mrs. King: No except to go to Ridge Rec Hall.
Mr. McDaniel: Right, to the rec hall, things such as that.
Mrs. King: And at that time there was not as much. We worked seven days a week, as you understand or probably know, and that was something that if we ever got to go to North Carolina – at that time we were on Central Time in Oak Ridge. Had you been told that?
Mr. McDaniel: Mhm.
Mrs. King: And then they changed it. Therefore my mother lived still lived in Statesville, and we’d have to put together the time to call. Sometimes I would get a ride home to Statesville, and that was later because we didn’t go back and forth very much, but those dances were important because the soldiers too were lost and all these young people coming out of college needed a place for entertainment.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh sure and then to socialize and meet and get to know folks.
Mrs. King: Mhm, just primarily dancing.
Mr. McDaniel: What was it like, different? Oak Ridge in 1944 was pretty primitive.
Mrs. King: I can tell you. I was a real pioneer not only for coming out of North Carolina to work and coming to Oak Ridge, but we really felt we were doing something because it was to help win the war, Keith. That’s why I’ve always felt a – I’ve always said I was a Tar Heel born and Tar Heel bred and dead but this has been my home since 1944 and we walked boardwalks and we had at that time we had to have coupons to get shoes which were plastic heels. If we wanted a new pair of shoes, we had to go to Knoxville to ride the busses or the trailers. They really were like cattle cars and you just would sit on long benches inside that. But the boardwalks – now Caroline, after she came, lived in a dorm at Townsite that one of those three that was in the concourse up there across from Central Cafeteria. That was – I digressed. Where was I?
Mr. McDaniel: That’s okay. You were talking about going home. You were talking about the difference between Statesville and Oak Ridge.
Mrs. King: Yes. Here it was truly mud. I have pictures and we had to walk boardwalks to get all the way to the top of my hill. We walked boardwalks at town site and the boards were an inch or so and you’d catch a heel in the boardwalk and the mud. We’d carry our shoes sometimes because we didn’t want to ruin our little plastic heels. But things were – you didn’t have rubber heels then and rubber soles because they were using it for the war. So it was a special place for us and I never thought I’d end up in Tennessee, but I did.
Mr. McDaniel: All right, so tell me about – you met your husband at a – or your husband to be at a dance. Tell me about that.
Mrs. King: Yes. I knew right away. That sounds strange. First of all, he asked me to dance and then we went over and stood – I’ve always love to dance – I’m a jitterbug. I was a jitterbug. Knew how to dance the jitterbug and liked that and I realized though, when he asked me, he was different and I thought, “Okay.” So he was from the Philadelphia, Delaware area and his relatives lived over right – his grandparents did in Delaware. I thought, “Well he’s soft-spoken and I just like this person,” and we talked and we went in – there was an old tree which I never did get – this was outside the fence of the tennis courts, and we stood there and talked and talked and talked and I said, “Now that’s my sister Caroline up there.” Then we danced and had a good time. Then many dates later I realized that – and I wrote to my mother that I believe he’s the one that I would like to marry someday. So it’s just – it was just like that. I met him at the tennis court dances and many of my friends met their husbands at the tennis court dances.
Mr. McDaniel: I’m sure. Now was he –
Mrs. King: He was stationed with the Special Engineer Detachment and he was called in from Louisiana. I could have looked that up but I didn’t. He had been stationed down there and then came here to work for the captain. They were to receive these new, young recruits who were in the Army, and Campbell worked under the captain at that time to do the paperwork on those young men who came in.
Mr. McDaniel: And his name was Campbell King.
Mrs. King: Campbell King. C-A-M-P-B-E-L-L. We dated on and on and occasionally I would date someone else and he dated someone else. That was for one –
Mr. McDaniel: As young people do.
Mrs. King: As young people do, yes.
Mr. McDaniel: So when did you all get married?
Mrs. King: Not till ’46.
Mr. McDaniel: For a couple of years, not too many.
Mrs. King: March of ’46.
Mr. McDaniel: Almost two years.
Mrs. King: I was in a very bad automobile accident in October of ’45 here in Oak Ridge. It was a foggy night and the moonlight was out, and I can see the moonlight, the fog, and then the river or the land. Somehow or other it – we ended up – there were five of us – no it was six of us, three couples. Yeah, that’s right. My sister Caroline was on the front seat and the other two couples, you can always get the other person in somehow or other. So anyway it was a very – I was hospitalized at the Oak Ridge hospital for eight weeks.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, my goodness.
Mrs. King: When I got out, the captain took my husband, Campbell and me over the mountains because his wife was over there, and he took us over there to my mother’s, where I was to recuperate. I stayed – we had already planned – he had asked me to marry him in early October – no, in August. This was early October around the 18th. So it wasn’t early.
Mr. McDaniel: But ’45.
Mrs. King: ’45. Then the gates weren’t open and the Red Cross notified mother the next morning and of course she couldn’t – had a hard time getting contact with the hospital because the – our doctors were stationed – they came from Rochester. Yeah, Rochester. But they were Army. We had great doctors. Campbell was injured and was hospitalized. I have a picture taken. He was the sergeant, they took his picture for the old – have you seen one of those old SED yearbooks?
Mr. McDaniel: Yes, ma’am. I sure have.
Mrs. King: Well Campbell’s picture’s in the front of that yearbook. He had – they borrowed a doctor’s desk and put his name on it so they could get him in the yearbook.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mrs. King: Yeah. If you’ve seen one of those, that’s where Campbell is.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, okay.
Mrs. King: But anyway I was –
Mr. McDaniel: So was your sister injured?
Mrs. King: Yes, but not as badly, and fortunately she was still here and kept on plugging along. Fortunately Christmas did come in there, but that happened in October. For my family, my sister – everybody had to send things. My sister and her husband came to visit us at – I think that was in – well it was before I was married, so it was in the fall sometime. She had to get special permission to come in.
Mr. McDaniel: While you were in the hospital she came and visited you?
Mrs. King: Yes. Of course, Caroline was here, but they had – mother didn’t get here at that time. Yes – I can’t quite – I’ve been trying to put it together when mother came because they had to meet her and mother stayed at the guesthouse then. Both – but then later we stayed – we had planned to be married at the end of January. We had already talked about it. Of course, the accident said, “Wait.” So we went over the mountains and I stayed at mother’s and we started planning and decided to go ahead, but we moved it forward to March.
Mr. McDaniel: March. Now, did you come back?
Mrs. King: No, I did not.
Mr. McDaniel: You did not come back, okay.
Mrs. King: No, not till after we were married, because I was still technically on Tennessee Eastman’s payroll and it was the kind of thing that was worked out between Tennessee Eastman and however they’ll work it out, but they knew I was recuperating. When I was married, then they sort of worked it out. Then I just retired from Eastman. That was in the spring or early summer after we came.
Mr. McDaniel: So you got married in March of ’46.
Mrs. King: Yes, March 23rd.
Mr. McDaniel: And you came back to Oak Ridge.
Mrs. King: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: So, as a couple, you and Campbell came back as a couple?
Mrs. King: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: So where did you live?
Mrs. King: Well let’s see. First of all, he called me when we were still planning the – then he said – Campbell had already been hired by Union Carbide. He had been dismissed from the Army right at the same time.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s what I was about to ask. He had been discharged from the Army.
Mrs. King: Yes, he was discharged, yes. So he called and he said, “They have a house for us.” I said, “Where is it?” I didn’t know all the ifs, ands or whatever at that time, not that I know that much now. But anyway, he said, “They have a house, a “B” house and it’s up on Outer Drive.” Well, I later found out where it was. I said, “Campbell what would I do?” I said, “Caroline is out there and she could help you.” This lady, this friend of mother’s said, “Well, Mary Anne, you could have always taken a crate in and used it as a table,” but I knew we had to have furniture because they weren’t furnished. The apartments were furnished. So we rented a home. So I said, “Campbell, I don’t know what to say except, do you feel we could get the house?” He didn’t want that responsibility at that time. So we got a furnished apartment. I’m leading up to something. The ones that are now considered the slums that they want to tear down, that was where we lived.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mrs. King: Yes. My sister who lived in Statesville, she and her husband let me bring their Packard back over the mountains with our wedding gifts. As we – we stayed at the Guest House our first night, because the company had arranged for us to stay there. Then we went to Hillside Road and rented one of those houses which were furnished, those apartments. At that time, principals lived there, young scientists who worked out at X-10 and others.
Mr. McDaniel: Those were nice apartments then.
Mrs. King: They were nice apartments. Even now when one of my daughters and I were – she said, “Let me go see these apartments that look so terrible.” Well he had sort of had them painted on the outside. I won’t use names here. But she said – I said, “We passed it, Nancy.” I said, “It was that one in the middle that they’ve fixed up nicely.” She said, “Well, it must be on the inside because she didn’t think they looked that bad.” It’s shame that those three buildings had –
Mr. McDaniel: It is a shame. Oh, yeah.
Mrs. King: In an area that it was a nice apartment. I know Campbell and I bought John Quill’s – we lived there five years, and our first baby was born there and we moved to the “B” house around the corner on Nixon after she was two months old. But the whole thing was that was a good area and it was all young couples had and it was furnished. But at the end of the first – about the ’46, ’47, we were allowed to get rid of the furnished apartment and rent – and buy our own furniture. So we did. We went into Halls and Blankenship and bought some beautiful furniture. That couch over there is one of the original pieces. But the whole thing is you could get good furniture in Knoxville which we didn’t have here at the time. So we bought our own furniture, but we still paid the full amount as though we were renting the furniture. Then we lived there for five years. Somewhere in that time, they built the Garden Apartments, and they wanted all these young couples who lived on Hillside and up off Highland View, they wanted them to move out of those Hillside apartments. So we made plans to move up the hill. But we found out that we could still pay for that furniture and still keep it. We found it out the night before we were to move. So we stayed there until we could get a house. At that time you had to have a child. Had we known all that earlier, they might have put us out of our “B” house because they did put many people out if they didn’t have children. And at the time we were married, we of course had no children. That’s why I say you learn things as you go along.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s exactly right. So what was it like for you two and how long were you married before you had your first child?
Mrs. King: Five years.
Mr. McDaniel: Just like me and my wife. We were married five years before –
Mrs. King: Is that right?
Mr. McDaniel: It’s interesting. You were talking about that Hillside. Our very first house was 102 Pleasant Road which was just right behind those apartments.
Mrs. King: That’s right – yes. That was Hunter Apartments. Now see, we didn’t live there. We lived up here. The Hunter Apartments – I didn’t – they were going to put us all out, and I did – we covered all those from Hillside up to just beyond Hillside and Highland. They tore that one down first so that they’d get something built there. But anyway, we went to all those apartments and said, “Did you want to move out?” This was a socialized – what do you call it? You live under – they tell you what to do? Social?
Mr. McDaniel: Sure it is. Yes.
Mrs. King: What is the word – is it social? What’s the –
Mr. McDaniel: Well it’s a – yeah, I know what you’re saying. I can’t remember.
Mrs. King: Yes. But I did – I got – and I found out how many didn’t want to move. It was a hundred and forty-some out of a hundred and sixty-some. So I turned it in. We wrote letters to the senator, Kefauver, it was at the time, and another one, but here in Oak Ridge you had to do what they told you uptown.
Mr. McDaniel: What they told you to do. Right. It was a government town and basically had to do what they told you to do.
Mrs. King: Government town. It’s amazing that that has just begun to leave and people still know it’s a government town, but it’s not as much. If you bought a house, someone would walk across your yard. Well this is government. And I said, “No this isn’t government anymore. It’s our town. And even if it weren’t – I mean our home.” But it’s – you know, parents would say, “You can do anything you want to,” to some of their children. So we moved to Nolan Road and when our baby was only – Anne Todd is her name, and we moved over there on Memorial Day Weekend and it was the coldest Memorial Day they’d ever had that we had.
Mr. McDaniel: What year was that?
Mrs. King: We wouldn’t light the furnace because you used coal to get warm and they had just painted the interior of the house, and we didn’t want it to –
Mr. McDaniel: To get all black?
Mrs. King: Right, exactly.
Mr. McDaniel: My goodness.
Mrs. King: So we fixed a place in the kitchen that we could turn on the stove so we could bathe her. That just lasted a couple of days. As you know Oak Ridge or Tennessee, you turn around and the weather changes.
Mr. McDaniel: Of course.
Mrs. King: That’s how it was. We had that little two bedroom “B”.
Mr. McDaniel: Now what year did you move to Nolan?
Mrs. King: In the same year Anne Todd was born, 1951. She was born in March 24th of 1951.
Mr. McDaniel: Well let’s go back and let me ask you, what was it like for you, you and your husband, those first five years, no children? You’re still young. The war was over and what was it like in Oak Ridge for you all?
Mrs. King: Well Campbell and I believed in supporting the towns around us, the cities. I call it ‘Knoxtown,’ but it’s Knoxville. But anyway, we would go to the ballets and a series and also I must go back a few minutes. At Grove Center in Oak Ridge, which was – at that time, you could go by bus to get to, you could go to – they brought in outside entertainment just as they brought in one of the Dorsey Orchestras to play at Grove Center, Recreation Hall. When we were married, Grove Center was just down the hill from us. We would go to Grove Theater down there and up at the old – where the playhouse – well up there, up at Townsite and they’ve put offices in there now and I don’t know how to tell you what is – well, what is there now?
Mr. McDaniel: The Ridge Theater?
Mrs. King: The Ridge Theater, yeah. And then there was the Sim –
Mr. McDaniel: There’s the Recreation Hall right there on the corner. Where that came along later I guess right across from the Guest House.
Mrs. King: No, no. We went there, too. Yes. But we did more going to Knoxville if we could. If they had dances they usually used a hotel ballroom or something like that. Not many of the young people had cars at that time. So we’d get rides with other people. For – you asked what we did. We would go to on busses to Knoxville and mostly we would – and we had friends here who had homes and we could go to see them. As young married couples, you’d have friends in different parts of town. So then as to doing things, another thing, Campbell and I believed in supporting UT. He was an avid sports person. We got season tickets to UT ballgames.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right? Football games?
Mrs. King: Yeah, UT football games and we had them right on the 50-yard line. Now, of course, they would take those away from us now, but anyway we did.
Mr. McDaniel: So how long did you have those tickets for? How many years?
Mrs. King: I could go back to – if I could under my bed and pull out all my scrapbook material – I started to do that, Keith, but I can’t bend easily now.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s okay.
Mrs. King: But I have a lot of the old programs. I’d say we had them for two to three years and it was – that’s when they began. Campbell and I believed in “Don’t talk against them. Join them.” But they were not supported by all these people who had come from different states. We were a melting pot, and I guess to a great degree we’re still a melting pot. But we had people from every state in the union and across the seas.
Mr. McDaniel: But you know probably you came from a family that was probably more exposed to that kind of thing than others were because your father was an attorney. He was a professional person and he probably had interaction with folks that were not always like you.
Mrs. King: Yeah. When mother and father went on their honeymoon to New York, they went to opera while they were up there. So you see, they were, each of them, they were well educated and they believed in education and helping their children. Yes. Another thing we believed in was the historical spots. That was – Mary Anne grew up knowing old historical spots and that’s what half my collections are, historical items that I give to the children about old places in my hometown. I supported Blount Mansion and Ramsey House and those places that they didn’t seem to have an interest. I was asked by the Knoxville ladies whom I had met through DAR. I was a member of Daughters of the American Revolution. So I met different people in different fields. It was – you have to grow with a – we took both the Knoxville papers. We took the – it wasn’t called The Oak Ridger at the time, the little Oak Leaf, I believe it was called.
Mr. McDaniel: The Oak Leaf or the Journal or Oak Ridge Journal?
Mrs. King: It wasn’t that, the book – but we took all of those before and we had a little Army paper that used to come out that I had, and I’ve always believed in knowing your area, and even to this day I’ll find out where one town is and I’ll say, “Oh it’s that direction,” and yet it’s so close and yet so far, just because you don’t have a chance to visit it.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Exactly. So your daughter was born, you said, in ’51?
Mrs. King: Yes. We lived then at 100 Nolan Road. And then Nancy was born in – Nancy Campbell we named her – in May of ’53.
Mr. McDaniel: ’53, okay.
Mrs. King: Yes. Our children went to Pine Valley School and were quite active there. And we were through different means, [laughter] the good old PTA, raising funds and having carnivals and things like that.
Mr. McDaniel: Of course. Now, when did you move to Nixon?
Mrs. King: When we were allowed to buy – let’s see, we had bought our “B” house. We were allowed to buy that. Everybody could at that time.
Mr. McDaniel: Right, everybody. That was in the mid-50s.
Mrs. King: Yes, it was about –
Mr. McDaniel: ’56?
Mrs. King: Well, we moved in ’56, but we lived there before we bought this one. We bought it from the people who were moving out of Oak Ridge and we had tried to buy other “D”s and they were taken. So it turns out that this was to be our home, and I was glad because the girls could move there and bring around in little wagons and things they wanted to move. So we did move here and stayed probably fifty – let’s see. Let me close my eyes. One from six, five. In ’56.
Mr. McDaniel: In ’56. So you moved here in ’56.
Mrs. King: 101 Nixon.
Mr. McDaniel: And you’ve been here ever since.
Mrs. King: Yes. And we’ve added on, and we had these bookcases built and the mantel put in, and the things around the ceiling and the baseboards that I had grown up with. Now, I grew up with ten foot ceilings, but I had to get used to not having those. [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: I’m sure. Now your husband, what did he do for his career?
Mrs. King: Oh. He was with Union Carbide and I think they called it Industrial Engineering. We were not allowed to ask, Keith, and having worked in the Security Department, I still have that feeling about Oak Ridge. I don’t ask you where you work. I don’t ask you where you live. That’s how we were taught. There was a sign going out of Oak Ridge at the time then. The man had his finger like that. In other words, as you go out don’t say a word. And that was, even later, they had that billboard up as we went out of Oak Ridge over the railroad tracks that way.
Mr. McDaniel: They still have billboards up now going out of Oak Ridge towards Kingston. They’ve still got some new security billboards.
Mrs. King: See that, I had heard that but I didn’t know where it was because I don’t get over that way as much.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Out past K-25 right before you cross the river.
Mrs. King: Well I used to go out that way to get I-40. It’s exactly twelve miles from our house to where the old K-25 entrance is. I have all things down to a pat. [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Of course. So your kids grew up in Oak Ridge. Your husband had a job. Now did once the kids were – did you remain a homemaker or did you go back to work?
Mrs. King: No. I did a lot of volunteering and being active with the groups, different groups. In 1960 I received a notice from Paul Bjork who was then head of the Hospital saying that they would like a group – he said, “You’ve been recommended to be part of a group to organize a volunteer group.” There were twenty-four or five who came and then they gradually dropped out and we ended up with five members of that group who planned and asked and we would – let’s say your name was recommended as – it was only women at that time, and just say you’ve been recommended to be a volunteer and this would be your plan. So we worked on that and getting different ones who would be with us when we officially opened. We met from January through March, and at that time had our first general meeting.
Mr. McDaniel: And what year was that?
Mrs. King: That was 1962.
Mr. McDaniel: ’62, okay.
Mrs. King: Then that was January ’62, and we had a terrible snowstorm there. Different ones of us – I fell out in the snow and another lady fell and broke her leg and we’d have to have meetings in between, but some of us could go. But we ended up with five different ones who were that. I’m the only – on that – of the original group who still works, but there’s another one who’s still living of that five.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mrs. King: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: Were those the ‘Gray Ladies,’ as they called them?
Mrs. King: No, no. The Gray Ladies were there, and they had been doing a great job for the Red Cross, but they were not part at that time of the volunteer group. Now we who went in, but there was some kind of – I don’t know, something between the Red Cross and the Hospital that they had to be different.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure, of course.
Mrs. King: So the Gray Ladies still stayed and they did their part, but we originally – as we met as a group, we knew what we would do was to have a group that could have a – open a gift shop and it was there for the patients, for those who came to see the patients and for the employees if they needed something. Just was a very small spot. Then we had discussed different things. Some of them wanted to work with patients more and others of us were to have this turnover. We had three different shifts in the gift shop. So we had to fill those spots. I worked twice a week every other week at the time, a Monday morning and a Thursday night, because we had the two different shifts plus the afternoon one. But the whole thing was they needed night people and we discussed it. I discussed it with my children and my husband and I said, “This is what would be even when I took another job with the Woman’s Club,” which I had been active with. I said, “They’ve asked me to do this and this will take a lot of time, but I’m just going to sign up with it for one year or two.” At that time we only nominated officers for one year. But I believed in discussing these things with the family. I think it was important because the children were still active and going to dance classes and those kinds of things and cheerleading. Campbell and I were avid supporters of the Wildcats and had season tickets to that.
Mr. McDaniel: You only had the two daughters, right?
Mrs. King: Two daughters.
Mr. McDaniel: So you stayed active then.
Mrs. King: Yes, yes. I’m still – as I said, I still can go down and give – what do you call it – support to the one who’s handling the computer cash register.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. That’s good. At the Gift Shop?
Mrs. King: Yes, at the Gift Shop at the Hospital. Now there are many who came in later, but they were not – they were the ones who started out once we opened. But I’m the only one of the original group still there.
Mr. McDaniel: Looking back over the years that you’ve lived in Oak Ridge, how have you seen Oak Ridge change for the good or for the worse, whatever?
Mrs. King: I never think of things going worse. I’m a very positive person. You have to adjust to everything you do. You may not like the way things are going, but it was a pleasant change to have the new Municipal Building built and the Library built because the original library was part of the original Ridge Rec Hall. I guess you know that, too.
Mr. McDaniel: Yes, ma’am.
Mrs. King: The whole thing is that these buildings were a beginning. I think it’s always nice to have people come in. It’s not the prettiest of sculpture, but that sculpture is different down there. It’s more modern. But those who were graduating the same year I was, their sculpture at Woman’s College has that same field as – presentation, and I say, “Who are we to say if an artist feels something that it’s not the way it’s to be?” You grow to like it. We joined the playhouse. Campbell acted in one play. It was Edward, My Son. [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mrs. King: Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: What year was that?
Mrs. King: The year Paul’s son was born, and he named him Edward. [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: Really? Is that right?
Mrs. King: Yeah. I don’t remember the year right now.
Mr. McDaniel: Right.
Mrs. King: But we were asked to join the Oak Ridge Dance Club, one of the originals. There again, that had to go through – even with the DAR – all of the clubs had to go through USED, AEC – had to come through there in order to get permission to even have a group here. They had had a group before the gates opened. I joined the group when it was the original – they called it the Samuel Whitney Chapter after someone’s ancestor. We later decided to name it something that was more indicative of this area. So it’s called the Clinch Ben Chapter. That’s why I think these are things that – it’s not that there were not things to do. We joined the Friends of the Library at the time and tried to support things. Campbell was always interested in government and he’d go to the meetings and with young children, I didn’t always get to go to the same things. We helped build St. Stephens, our church, the Episcopal church. There was just always something to do. There’s never been a lack of things to do in Oak Ridge.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. So when did you lose your husband?
Mrs. King: He died in 19 – just a minute. I have to close my eyes.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s okay.
Mrs. King: Let’s see. Campbell died first – 1986.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay, ’86.
Mrs. King: February the 10th of 1986 and mother died in 1990.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, really?
Mrs. King: So I have a brother who died in 1960. So I’m sort of going along as different ones – I’m real good at dates until I get there.
Mr. McDaniel: I understand.
Mrs. King: We went back and forth. He loved my family and going to North Carolina. His family lived at the time in Ardmore, Pennsylvania right outside of Philadelphia. We’d go up there to visit. We’d go to North Carolina to visit. We believed in family gatherings. Campbell liked my sisters and I have two sisters who are deceased and one who’s still living, lives in California. It’s Caroline who lives out there.
Mr. McDaniel: Now is she the one that came to Oak Ridge with you?
Mrs. King: Yes.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, okay. How long was she in Oak Ridge? Did she leave after the war?
Mrs. King: She stayed on. I know when we were married she was out here. That was ’46 and I think she entered – she went back to get her – she was taking a commercial – she’d had two years at Mitchell and decided to go on and get this commercial degree so she could end up coming to help in the war. I mean doing it. At the time we didn’t know we were coming to Oak Ridge, but she decided to go ahead and go back to get her real degree. She went there and Chapel Hill and the University of North Carolina but she went to Woman’s College and the University of North Carolina and did get her degree and went back to get that in North Carolina.
Mr. McDaniel: Then she ended up moving to California at some point.
Mrs. King: Yes. At first when she was married she lived in New York. That’s where her husband was in business, and then they moved to California. They have one daughter and the daughter still lives out there. We have double names in our family and three Delights. My sister was a Nancy Delight, one of my sisters. She had a daughter named Nancy Delight. Then Caroline named her daughter Delight Louise and then another – it goes down the road, and if you hear a Delight you know it came from our family.
Mr. McDaniel: Where are your daughters now?
Mrs. King: Well let’s see. Nancy – Anne Todd and her husband live in Knoxville and they’re going to be moving to Florida soon. This is – they like the warm weather down there. My son-in-law is still in business. He has a group that’s – he feels it’s more connected to large areas. So he and Anne Todd have been down there looking at houses. Both of them – our daughters – were graduated from University of Tennessee. Nancy is an attorney at law. I say that because my father – I had this sign that said, “Attorney at Law,” and that’s what we always went by. He’s an attorney at law.
Mr. McDaniel: Attorney at law. That’s right.
Mrs. King: Yeah. But anyway, Nancy has her own office and she worked for the state for several years, the Transportation Department and an attorney down there. She went from college down there and got a job. Her husband is in landscaping – I mean, not landscaping.
Mr. McDaniel: Architecture?
Mrs. King: No, you go out and – surveying. He’s a surveyor – he has his own surveying business.
Mr. McDaniel: Surveying, yes right. Now where does she live?
Mrs. King: They live in Hendersonville. They have a home, but her office is in Nashville, and his office is upstairs. They bought an old building there on 21st Street. It’s right near the Vanderbilt campus, not too far away. And Anne Todd worked in marketing for a long time. Now she does – Anne Todd went back – she had to go back to get an – she had a marketing degree, has it but in order to teach English as a second language, which she started out doing as a volunteer in Knoxville, she realized she needed a teacher’s license and she got that and then she also got – had a major in English as a Second Language to get her higher degree, Master’s. So she still does that to people who come to Knoxville or this area who need to be directed in that English.
Mr. McDaniel: She needs to be in Oak Ridge doesn’t she?
Mrs. King: Well, yes. She teaches these who come from Korea and go to UT. The families come over. For a while she was teaching and going to – oh, I could get her schedule. I’m so turned around I didn’t know how she did it, but she did that in private and has really enjoyed that.
Mr. McDaniel: Well is there anything else that I’ve not asked you about that you’d like to talk about?
Mrs. King: I don’t know. You just keep on asking and I’ll try to go to it.
Mr. McDaniel: It sounds like you and your husband, you had a full life in Oak Ridge and were very active.
Mrs. King: We did, yes. We have many good friends here. It’s the kind of – he played tennis down on the tennis courts. As he – after he retired even, he was active in the tennis – they’d go down – then he later joined the – what they called the Snowbird Group. They’d go down in cold weather no matter how cold it was and play tennis early in the mornings.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mrs. King: Yes. [laughter]
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, my goodness.
Mrs. King: And then it’s just different things that have happened. I know there’s so many things that I could bring you up to date with and I’m sure you’ve had them all covered though in your interviewing.
Mr. McDaniel: That’s okay. That’s all right. This is about you.
Mrs. King: I know. Well I’m still active in DAR and I still like supporting everything in Oak Ridge, that is the Art Center, and these places that some of us – and I still send money to some of the – well I have stopped the Knoxville groups because I believe in supporting Oak Ridge and the Children’s Museum. I could have joined each one of these, but monetary support is as important as active participation, that is, in filling in. So I have supported several of these. I still support the Iredell Museum in Statesville, North Carolina.
Mr. McDaniel: Is that right?
Mrs. King: Yeah.
Mr. McDaniel: Well good for you.
Mrs. King: I send money to Mitchell College in memory of my mother. I did it as a special scholarship fund for a while but they wanted to include it. But that’s how I send it, started it off as a scholarship fund to mother.
Mr. McDaniel: Well that’s good.
Mrs. King: I think you have to remain active, and mother and father both, as I said, believed in education. Since I was – I’m part of the hometown and will always be – there’s no – I have many cousins left in Statesville, but it’s something that I always have a spot in my heart for each one who’s there.
Mr. McDaniel: Well thank you so much for taking the time to speak to us –
Mrs. King: Well thank you for coming.
Mr. McDaniel: – and reminiscing and talking about your life and you and your husband, family’s life here in Oak Ridge.
Mrs. King: Yes, and the children are still very much a part of Oak Ridge. I think that they always come home. In fact Nancy’s coming back for her class reunion this weekend.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, well, good.
Mrs. King: Each of them – I should have mentioned my grandchildren. Anne Todd and her family have two children, a boy and a girl. Nancy has the one daughter. They’re much a part of my – if you look around my house I have pictures of everybody. There, all – that’s my mother. But I’m always surrounded by those I love.
Mr. McDaniel: Oh, well, good.
Mrs. King: Yes. It’s just a part of me.
Mr. McDaniel: Sure. Well thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Mrs. King: Thank you Keith.
Mr. McDaniel: Okay.
[end of recording]